2017 New Year Resolutions

Welcome back everyone. We at IENstore hope that all of you had a great and relaxing holiday and that you are filled with ambition for the New Year.

For most people the holiday means celebrating with family and friends. It often means travelling and good food. Maybe you ate a little bit too much and found it difficult to follow you usual training schedule. So it’s time to fall back to our daily routine again.

Not surprisingly most gym memberships are sold in January. To get into better shape is a vey popular New Year resolution. A very common goal is to lose weight or gain muscles. If that’s your situation, let me guide you in what I believe is the right way to get in shape.

First of all, we can break down your body mass into two main categories: Fat mass and fat-free mass. Fat free mass is your muscles, organs, bones, and other tissues.

The muscle mass is a very important part of your body. It has a large impact on the calories you burn, called the metabolic rate. Besides keeping your joints together and supporting your balance and agility, muscles burn calories both when they are working and when they are at rest. You should always strive for having more muscle mass than fat mass.

Your fat mass is exactly what it sounds like. It’s fat. But how is fat created? It’s very simple really. The three main sources of nutrition are carbs, fat and protein. Carbs and fat functions as fuel for the body whereas protein is mostly used as building material. But all three contain energy. And if you eat food with more energy than you burn, the excess energy will be stored in your body as fat mass.

Don’t get me wrong here. Fat is still important to help your body to function. Fat provides your body with energy and also help move the vitamins A,D,E, and K through your bloodstream.

Research suggests that a protein rich diet with a reasonable intake of fat but which is low on carbs, is a good way to balance what you eat between energy intake and not feeling hungry. You have to eat less calories than you consume to lose fat. Feeling hungry is probably where most people go wrong when they try to lose weight. So a simple but working nutrition advice is to have a protein rich content in your meals. Don’t be afraid of fat but cut down drastically on carbs. That means staying away from bread, pasta and sugar just to mention some common sources of carbs.

The amount of fat that is being considered as being healthy varies between individuals, the chart below will give you a general idea of how much body fat that’s healthy.

The type of training you are doing has a large impact on your results, so make sure that the type of training you are doing matches your goals.

The standard recommendation is that you need approximately 0.8 grams of protein per kilo of body weight but if you workout on a regular basis you need up to 2,5 times the standard recommendation and which can be difficult to reach up to if you’re not used to it. A good solution to help you reach up to that level is to take high quality whey protein or a protein bar.